You can share a printer using a Virtual Private Network.
You can share a printer using a Virtual Private Network.
Hi, I'm trying to set up a printer over the internet using my Asus router (RT-N12+). When I tried sharing the printer and connecting both computers through the VPN, adding the right credentials was fine. But when I went to manually add the printer locally, it said "network path not found." I noticed something strange: one computer is on a subnet like 192.168.10.X, while my server PC is on a different one like 192.168.0.X.
The easiest way is to get a router that has a VPN server built-in. Back when there were fewer routers with this feature, it was rare today, but many have it now. Most of them support OpenVPN. All you need to do is run the router's VPN service on the computer where your printer is located. Then install an OpenVPN client on your PC. Basically, once you connect through the VPN, your remote computer looks like it is on the same local network as the printer. Even some Microsoft discovery stuff works, but often using the actual IP address of the printer is simpler than trying other methods. There are many other ways to do this, though then you need to understand what you're doing or find a guide to help set it up.
It probably doesn't matter but it does depend on how the VPN was set up. Usually, when a home user sets up a VPN, they change the network address of the computer so that it looks like it is in the same place as the printer. So if your PC and the printer were both connected to the 192.168.0.x network, your computer would have to be translated into an IP address from that range too. If you use a more advanced kind of VPN, you sometimes need to set up special routes for it to work properly. Everything depends on what equipment is between you and the connection and which devices are doing the routing. The main thing here is most consumer routers are not real routers and they cannot do true routing.
I look... I don't see any settings set up for that VPN coming out of my router. So I think I'll need to get a real VPN server and client together to use the printer from another place.
I'll give it a shot, but my dot matrix printer doesn't support internet connections well. So I'm using a computer to share the connection instead. Both computers have built-in virtual private networks (VPNs) set up. That way we can talk through the router.
You would then use the IP address of the computer that the device is connected to. It should work just like taking your PC and plugging it into the exact same network. Every messy thing you have to do to share the printer will be exactly the same except you are using a VPN instead of a cable.